Script Hooks: Integrating Retrospect with IFTTT

Overview

IFTTT, short for "If This, Then That", is an online instant messaging and collaboration tool used by over one million users. One of its compelling innovations is the ability to integrate a wide variety of applications to all go to IFTTT. With Script Hooks, you can monitor Retrospect from IFTTT as well.

For this recipe, we are using a single Maker event for all Retrospect triggers. If you wanted to treat these differently, you would want to change the RetroEventHandler file as well as create multiple IFTTT applets.

Figure 7. IFTTT trigger created

Figure 8. Choose an action to do with each Retrospect event

This is what IFTTT will do when Retrospect sends each event. There are hundreds of services to choose from. For this example, we are going to use another IFTTT service to create a daily digest that will be sent each day with all the Retrospect events up until then.

Figure 9. Choose Email Digest

Figure 10. Create the entry for each event

Figure 11. Confirm and create

Your recipe is now done and turned on by default. If you added the Maker key, you are all done. There is no need to restart the Retrospect engine or application.

Testing

You can check your recipe on IFTTT by going to the recipe and clicking "Check Recipe". They also have a "View Logs" to see last activity.

Figure 12. Viewing and testing the recipe

Troubleshooting

If you do not get an email at the start of your next day, confirm the Maker key did not get cut off or have extra characters added. You can also test just the script by opening up a terminal or cmd window, and cd’ing to the eventhandler folder. Then type:

retroEventHandler "StartApp" "2/10/2017 12:01 AM" "true"

If there are any errors, they should display in the terminal or cmd window and point you toward a solution.